Why did my rankings drop after a Google core update?

Usually because Google re-scored the whole result set, not because your site was penalized. Core updates change how quality and relevance are weighed across the index, so pages can fall simply by being reassessed against competitors that now look like better answers — no rule was broken and no manual action was issued.

The first move is to confirm what actually dropped. Compare impressions against clicks by page and query in Search Console, and check whether the update coincided with anything on your end — a redesign, a migration, a batch of thin pages. A ranking dip with steady impressions is a different problem from a page dropping out of the index entirely.

Recovery is rarely a quick fix, and chasing rumored 'ranking factors' after an update wastes the most time. What tends to hold up is the unglamorous work: consolidating overlapping pages, deepening the ones that earn business, removing filler published for volume, and making sure each page is the most useful answer to the query it targets. Changes typically take weeks to register, often not until the next update.